Ugly Truths: Fear Runs Through My Veins

All the words are chasing each other through my brain. I'm discovering that I'm still good, too good, at hiding myself. I'm overly selective about what I will allow people to see in my life. Yes I get to choose what I share, where, when, how and there is wisdom in learning those things. Too often I justify not sharing in the name of wisdom and "Keeping myself safe". Because yes, safety and control as the Holy Grail in my world. Growing up without either, it's easy to turn them into my idol, my god, this dream I continue to chase, that leaves me exhausted and lonely. 

In the spirit of making a different choice here are some things I haven't been sharing in the way that I need to share:

1) My parents fly in late this Friday. They will be staying in town at a motel for 10 days. I haven't seen them in person for three years. I have not spent this much time with them since I moved out of their home, against their wishes 8 years ago. I am terrified to see them. I am more terrified to kick them out of my life for good. I am secretly hoping that he will be denied at the border or that he will decide to disown me for the third time (and this time I'm going to take him up on it!) 

2) I've been hitting every meeting in town for the last week and a half because I've never dealt with my parents when I was sober from all of my addictions/compulsive behaviours. I'm afraid that my sobriety won't hold up to having to deal with them. The last time they visited, I was still drinking. I have 18 months and 1 day today without alcohol in my life. All I want to do is drink. (or smoke or take pills). What I really want is to go back to self-injury. It's my primary addiction and the one that I'm still in love with even though it's been 4 years, 3 months, and 24 days since I last cut. 

3) I can't write at the moment. Not even for myself. It brings up all the lies and feelings about how writing is just one more flight of fancy that I'm too lazy to actually finish or do something with. 

4) My husband's abandonment of what was once our shared faith has caused me to shut down in my own exploration of what healthy spirituality is for me. I seem to be frozen in my own search for what this looks like for me. 

I hear the fear in my words, the fear that is driving my panic and it makes me sick. For those of you who are praying people, I would appreciate prayers on my behalf. 

Stories From the Past: A Beginning

I'm linking up with Marvia Davidson's Real Talk Tuesday talking about truth. This is my truth. 

I couldn't settle to sleep, so I stayed up all night reading Every Shattered Thing by Elora Ramirez. If you haven't read this book, you need to. It wrecked me. Because while I've never been a victim of human trafficking, I have a good friend who is. This shit is real. It happens. And the lucky ones escape.

My words are tumbling around in my brain, as I fight tears. Because this story, it reminded me of something I'd forgotten. It reminded me of how bad the abuse was. About how it really is a big deal. I forget that. I forget now that it isn't happening every day. Now that I don't live my life in terror. Now that I don't have to worry about my room being searched or being caught doing something that would dishonour the family.

I've buried my stories. The fear and terror. The shattering of my soul. I've told them, detached, clinical. Listing the details as though they were nothing. Because they were normal. But Stephanie's story, it reminds me that it's not normal. Her desperation, her tenuous grasp on hope, it reminds me of my own. I forget how far I've come. I minimize the healing that still needs to happen. It's easier that way. It's easier to shrug it off. It's easier to live my life half-connected, but that's no life at all. It's this washed out watercolour existence, that has more colour than my life ever contained so I think this is living.

I'm still surviving. In too many places and too many ways. I'm surviving. I'm still hiding. Hiding my words here, hiding my face, my passions, my dreams. I'm hiding the nightmares and sleepless nights. I'm hiding the daily pain, the constant reminders of medical treatment and care that I was denied.

I don't tell. I still don't tell. I feel like I've written this post a million times here already, and somehow I need to keep writing it. I need to keep telling myself the truth, because really that's what this is about. It's about truth. My truth. I forgot what it was like to find stolen moments of time. Time to myself, hidden away from the parents. The lies upon lies that I told praying that he wouldn't catch me in it, that he wouldn't take away the tiny pieces of freedom that I had earned.

I understand what it is to be property. My value was in the work I could do around the house, the free babysitting, the way that I bolstered his image as a good father - and when I didn't bolster his image then came the rages. The screaming words hurled at my soul - the ones that I don't have to hear ringing in my ears any more because I wear them, carry them in my bones. They weigh me down and keep me trapped.

fat, lazy, rebellious, witch, liar, bitch, slut, disappointment, demon-possessed, why can't you be better, why can't you be like so and so...on and on, his words defining me, shaping me. Demanding respect, demanding love, demanding affection, demanding unquestioning, unthinking obedience. Demanding, pushing, pulling, tearing at my skin.

And I feel the numb set back in, the fog settling back down, sinking deep into my bones. I feel myself start to float away from these memories, back into myself, back into the present because what's back there is too much, too hard, too painful.

It isn't enough though that I survived it, that I was given a place, a home to escape to. I owe it to myself to heal, to come alive, to be the person that he was desperate to destroy. I don't know how. I don't know how to unlock these stories. I still don't know how to tell. Yet I'm convinced and reminded yet again that I have to tell them, in halting words and imperfect details. I have to tell them so that maybe my soul will stop shattering with every anniversary, phone call, visit, sleepless night, flashback, memory, and trigger. I don't know how to heal from this. There isn't a manual. But I'm determined to try.

When I Allow Shame to Steal My Voice

It's after midnight. I need to be asleep. Instead I'm writing, after watching the first three episodes of Gilmore Girls. I never watched the whole show - I found it triggering too much of the time. My relationship with my Mom is distant, complicated, strained. Some of it is my fault. Some of it is hers. 

She's coming to visit next month. along with my father. I've been wrestling with my feelings around that for the past couple weeks. I'm not sure how to blog about it. I can write it for myself, but I don't know how to share it and so I've been quieter. It's one of the drawbacks of living afraid, of being raised in a world where you protect the family at all costs. I don't quite know how to stop. 

I lie to myself saying that I'm protecting what little relationship I have with my siblings and my mother. The truth has much more to do with my fear. My fear that people will be hurt by my truth. My fear that I will lose what little connection I have left with my family. My fear that it will end any sliver of hope of reconciliation. 

Deep down, I'm still a little girl wanting to be seen, loved, heard, accepted, valued, celebrated by the two people who brought her into this messed up world. Their version of acceptance though comes at the price of my Self. I will be accepted when I conform to who they want me to be - and I'm not sure that I even know who that person would be now. All I know is that I can't be anyone else. I can't hide my multiplicity, my self-injury scars, my recovery, my creativity, my evolving faith. I don't want to hide. 

I don't want to hide, yet here I am, hiding. Hiding my stories, hiding my truth, hiding my name, pouring over what I write to ensure there aren't too many identifying details, that my story couldn't be matched up by those I'm hiding from. 

I'm hiding because I'm ashamed. I'm ashamed that I'm damaged. Ashamed that I didn't leave the abuse earlier, that I stayed into adulthood. Ashamed that I couldn't find the right way to tell, to make it stop. I'm terrified that if I told my stories, you would side with my perpetrators because for most of my life, that's what every one did. I didn't know to call it abuse, or even abnormal. I'm ashamed to tell the details because I can't point to easily understood trauma - there were no broken bones, no hiding bruises, and those who molested, assaulted, and raped me weren't my parents. There have been too many people who have agreed with what my parents did. Agreed with their world view, their interpretation of Scripture, their God-given right to my life. 

I can't point to a single movement, cult, or faith tradition that harmed me. There were pieces from all over the map, from before there was a map. If my father had been a little more charismatic, dynamic, he would have made a great cult leader. As it was, people avoiding him like the plague. Adults lived in fear of him and left his children and wife stranded, without measurable help, holding onto broken promises, living out the cycle time after time. 

I got my butt handed to me today. Caiobhe wrote this amazing post that called my hiding right up on the carpet. I'm still wearing shame as though it actually covers and protects me. What a lie. Shame does nothing but steal my voice and rob me of living my life. It robs me of healing from the past, from moving forward to a place where fear no longer holds me as it's favourite captive. I'd gotten pretty good at telling myself that I didn't hold any shame any more. I got good at lying to myself that I had worked through my shame. Apparently it's time for another round. 

I feel shame for still having shame to work through. Ugh. It's this vicious circle, eating me from the inside out. I don't know how to allow myself to be in process, to be better but not yet whole. I'm somewhere between broken and healed - and I will always be somewhere in-between the two. I want to either be broken girl, who needs compassion, help, support, healing or the strong-I-learned-how-to-thrive-and-my-past-no-longer-holds-sway girl. I don't know how to do this both yet neither thing. But I think publishing this post is a step in the right direction. 

Reclaiming my Beauty

Once upon a time I executed a perfect pirouette and felt myself beautiful...until my body type was shamed as "not right" for a ballerina. Those shaming moments that came time and again beat down my sense of my own beauty. A sense that already came far too infrequently and already carried baggage with it.

The first sexual assault on my child body was when my body's beauty became used for someone else's exaltation of power and control. I was four years old and no longer innocent.  The pattern continued, one perpetrator after the next, using my beauty for their pleasure.  Beauty became something that needed to be hidden.  Every time I started to reclaim my own beauty there was another perpetrator stealing what belonged to me.

In my pain I harmed my body.  Cutting it hundreds of times in a vain attempt to purge the evil in me. I hid my body and my beauty.  I buried it with clothes and when that didn't work, I buried it with fat.  Now I could shame my body, to tell it how disappointed I was, how it had failed me in this too, that I now could never be beautiful again.  There will always be scars and stretch marks - my life story written on my skin.
I believed that I had destroyed any beauty that was left in my body.  I desecrated it and now what's left served only as a mockery of what could have been, of what was intended to be.

Over the last three years, I have journeyed with my body.  For a long time I've referred to it as "my ugly".  It wasn't mine.  It doesn't look like me.  As I've learned to let go of some of my self-hate and the false blame, my relationship with my body has come front and centre. I could see that who I was might be beautiful, but the skin it was housed in was deemed ugly and not suitable. My awakening heart wanted to feel beautiful, to be beautiful and I resigned myself that it would never happen.

I began belly dancing about a month ago.  After that first lesson I walked out sore, alive, and more connected to myself than I had ever felt.  I felt like a woman.  Each lesson connects me more and more to my body.  Every time I practice I see glimpses of how right now, in this moment there is beauty in my body.  Beauty in the movement.  Movement that comes from MY body.

As I learn to dance again, I'm learning that my beauty matters.  Deeply.  In times past when I felt my own beauty I was authentically and unashamedly myself. Feeling my own beauty, embracing it grounds me in my body and in the moment.  Time seems to hold it's breath as my essence twirls in celebration.  I owe my body an apology for the abuse I heaped on her and compassion for the abuse that was inflicted on her by others.

I cannot change what has come before.  However, I can learn how to see myself right now as beautiful.

The Girl In the Corner

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or...thoughts on self-perception.  also a further excavation into self-judgement.

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I've been turning this over and over for the last three weeks.  I've started to write this and walked away.  I've considered whether I needed to share it privately with my course-mates, or only with select individuals.  In the end I settled for writing it here.  Doing anything else is only fuelling the very feelings that I need to talk about.

I no longer believe that I'm intrinsically evil simply because I'm female.  I'm still wrestling with all of the repercussions of how that belief has defined me.  In the wake of that shifting and changing, another core belief surfaced.  I have this perception of myself as "other".  It has historical trauma roots like most things that I continually face.  It's not just one root.  This is almost as strong of a core belief as being evil used to be.  They are tied together.

I was other the very first time I went to public school because I lived in the cult up the street.  I was other because I already knew how to read.  I was other because there were crafts that I wasn't allowed to do.

I switched schools two years later - and I was other from day one.  It wasn't anything that I did or didn't do.  I lived in a different city and I hadn't started in kindergarten with the rest of the class.  The next fall the family moved out of the cult building into a house - and the friends that I had had there, well once again I became other.

When my self-harming behaviours escalated out of control in high school, I was the other that every one was terrified would succeed in killing herself.  Even before that I was the other not allowed to see my peers outside of school hours, not allowed to go to parties and I had long ago learned that it wasn't safe to bring friends home.

It happened again when I went to college.  It happened when physical health problems kicked in.  It happened when I moved to a new country.  It happens every time someone asks me "so what do you do all day?"

It's been a pattern in my life - a pattern of reinforcement.  I have a mountain of evidence that says I'm other, different.  I feel like the girl in the corner.  She learned to hide there and watch people.  Occasionally she will dart out to share a crumb of herself before running back to safety, to watch and see what these people do with the crumb. I hate this.  I get it.  I see where it comes from.  I want to be open with people, and not in my defiant - here's who I am, you can take it or leave it, see if I care - way.  I still believe that if people really knew me, they'd run away or try to "fix" me.  That's usually what happens.

I don't trust that people are generally good or have good intentions.  "Good" intentions are what shattered my personality.  "Good" intentions kept people from calling CPS and allowed them to believe the deflections from my mother.

I'm rambling.  Yes I'm learning slowly that there are places where I don't have to be the girl in the corner.  The lies still surface, even in those belonging places.  All week I've felt like the girl in the corner who can't stop crying.  The one who's so broken, too broken.  I want to stand up and scream that my heart feels shredded and I can't even tell you why.  I'm using every self-care tool that I have - it's the only thing that's keeping me from disappearing into the madness.

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Part of my self-care is that I've begun learning how to belly dance.  It never fails that I walk out after a class feeling grounded and connected to my body in a way that I've never been before.  I walk out sore, of course, but centred in myself and my emotions.  I can step back, look back at the part of this entry that I wrote this morning when all of the emotions were all up in my face and recognize that I don't always see myself as other.  I have kindness for myself.  I can see that yes I am broken and that brokenness doesn't define me, doesn't have to define me.  There is a me that is bigger than the brokenness of my identity, a me beyond the horrors inflicted upon me by others, and a me that is becoming this kick-ass woman that I truly love fiercely and passionately.

Temper Tantrums and Next Steps

Like most people I have patterns of behaviour in my life that are relatively predictable.  One of those patterns is my temper tantrums.  Every time I do something new, take another step forward or am placed in a situation that requires growth I inwardly throw a tantrum.  It goes something like this:

You can't make me.  I won't do it.  Nuh-uh this is stupid and it doesn't fit me anyway.  I'm too broken for this.  I'm further along now in my healing and I don't need this.  I don't get it.  I don't see the point.  YOU CAN'T MAKE ME!! YOU CAN'T! YOU CAN'T! YOU CAN'T!

I usually then plop down right where I am in a storm of angry tears.  See I resist because I'm afraid.  Every new step brings up all the fears.  I don't do well being pushed into things.  I sniff out unvoiced expectations like a blood hound.  Even when I know that one step comes after where I am, I still resist at first.

In my first time through the Twelve Steps, it became quickly apparent that every time we moved onto a new step my response would be "You can't make me do this."  I was blessed with leaders who were willing to stand out of the way and affirm that they weren't going to even try to make me do it.  I desperately need to know that I have a choice, one without strings attached to it.  I didn't have choices as a child and the choices that I made got me hurt even more.

The pattern is still here though.  Every time I run into something new, something that stretches me I throw myself down for a good old-fashioned tantrum.  God is so patient with me.  He's never shamed me for my tantrums.  He knows I'm scared.  He knows that I need the space to feel free to choose to take the step in front of me.

I get frustrated that this is the way that it is.  Too often I'm standing over my scared little girl-self screaming at her to grow up, stand up.  Telling her that is no way to behave and would she just do as I say because she's embarrassing me.  I'm a grown up and she doesn't get to carry on like this.  It's just not done.  I heap insults on her.  Rarely do I stoop down into her dirt and see her.  Often I grab her arm and drag her behind me, still kicking and screaming.

It doesn't work.  I always have to go back to her and make yet another amends, praying that God would please show me how to make her do what I need her to do.  It's the wrong kind of prayer though.  This time I'm asking that He would show me how to get down in the dirt with her and see her - her fears, her rage, her beauty.  She is fierce. Truth is, I need her.

Can I learn to touch her with gentleness, compassion, tenderness?  Can I learn to stop heaping judgement on her and instead wrap her in mercy?  I need to learn.  I must learn.  God help me learn.

The Sweet Spot

There is a sweet spot for going to bed and getting up.  If I miss those windows, I will struggle to sleep and no matter how many hours I sleep, won't feel rested.  I missed the window tonight.  I know better and I'm trying to not beat myself up over it.  There were things that I needed to finish tonight because otherwise they wouldn't get done.

I'm now in that place of wanting to stay up, to play, to have the day that I didn't have earlier where there was time for continuing to explore Found Poetry pieces and reading the three books that I've got going right now.  I want to do and be and create yet what my body and mind need more than anything right now is to rest and sleep.  I'm not sure why this happens.  Maybe it goes back to being  in college and getting that second wind. I'm really not sure what it is.  But something happens after 10 o'clock and no matter how tired I am, I can't make myself go to bed.  I'm a little kid staying up way past her bedtime, insisting that no she isn't tired yet in between huge yawns.  It would be cute if I was 3.  It's not so cute at 30.

It feels humiliating to have to ask my husband to make me go to bed as if I'm the child and he's the parent.  I probably need to explore why this happens.  Sleep and I don't often get along even when I do make it to bed in time.  It's always a crap shoot.  I know that going to sleep doesn't feel very safe.  That if I go to sleep I can't protect myself.  About half of the sexual trauma did occur at night, specifically around going to bed so that's a piece of it.

There's this frantic what-if-I-miss-something feeling that goes with it all too.  Again the roots of that are in trauma and not being allowed to forget anything or miss anything.  "I forgot", "I didn't know", or "I didn't hear you" were perilous phrases.

There's something else though.  Something before where my memories kick in. Something, someone young and terrified of beds and sleeping and being too warm because that's when you can't breathe.  I could guess what caused that but it would only be a guess that I could never confirm or disprove.

All of this to say, sleep and me aren't very good friends - except for the times that we are.  I can sleep during the day, and if I'm not careful will sleep all day and be up all night.  That's a recipe to fuel a major depressive episode.  I'm talking myself in circles here, trying to find the magic button that will let me go to sleep.  I feel like I'm rambling, aimlessly wandering and there is utterly no purpose to pushing publish on this.  It seems whiny and self-indulgent really.  Pointless to put out there in public except...it's me being vulnerable.  I hate talking about how normal day to day functioning is messed up because of PTSD, DID, vertigo, or because I'm recovering from several addictions.  I hate living a life where I can't take eating, sleeping, showering as things that I can do.  Each of those basic things requires elaborate planning and forethought for them to even happen.

All of it makes me look at God and go, "I survived for this?"  I'm tired and cranky and nothing good happens in my brain after 11 o'clock.  Time to get help to make myself go to bed.  I know things will look better in the morning.

Thursday Thoughts

My brain is weary tonight. My heart feels full and for the moment cried out. I'd forgotten yet again how many tears come with this journey to the centre of my being.  There were so many good words spoken in the call tonight for Be.  I have pages of scribbled notes and questions to chew over.  I'll get there.  For this moment my take-away is gratitude.  I'm not alone.  I'm not alone and there is hope.  That hope is part and parcel of what pierces through my shame.  It's not some nebulous wispy "we'll get there someday" hope.  This hope has voices and faces.  This is a hope borne of the raw beauty that is the hearts of brave women sharing pieces of story tonight.

I don't remember a time in my life before shame.  I don't remember a life before trauma.  I don't remember the little girl that I was before.  I'm not sure that I have a before.  It feels like shame is woven into every splintered piece of my personality.

Tonight in the chat it was spoken that we are made new.

I need a new. There's nothing left of me to be restored.  I need a new.  I can see pieces where He is making new in me and it's breathtaking. I have whole days now where I don't hold myself responsible for the evils that others inflicted on me.  I have whole days where I can see this incredible woman who has been buried in all of the shit.  I'm not there yet.  I don't see all the new yet.

For this night I'm holding onto Brandy's words.  "it's okay to be where you are. We have work to do." I'm sitting in them, wrapping them around my raw heart places and practising acceptance of where I am.

Fasting From Shame II

After writing this morning, I took my aching head and heart back to bed for some sorely needed rest.  Looking at how shame continues to impact my identity isn't easy.  I thought I was further down the road than I feel right now.  So many of my insecurities are screaming in my face.  Seeing myself as I am, without judging, or shoulding is proving challenging.

My vision of myself is skewed - one way or another.  Coming out of the last season of healing I felt more comfortable in my skin than I ever have before.  It was amazing.  I knew there was more work, but that felt far away and I blissfully soaked in the glow of no longer hating myself.  All too soon, here I am for the next layer, the next round and I want to go back to the bliss.

I enjoyed not gearing up for war every day and going to battle.  It was sweet relief.  Now it's time to fight again - I don't feel ready.  I feel as weary putting on my armour as I did taking it off in December.

In the middle of it all today though, the middle of being ready to throw in the towel and walk away, God still met me.  Jason Gray's new album dropped today and so many of the songs on there were this soothing balm for my soul.  Tonight I'm choosing to rest in that comfort, to not judge myself for where I'm at, and to extend grace to me in being where I am.

Ash Wednesday - Fasting From Shame

I haven't fasted in years.  Fasting has been a dirty word, one filled with disgust, shame, and guilt.  Disgust because all that I've seen of it has been from the place of worshipping a vending machine god.  Insert proper spiritual practice, make your selection and down falls your chosen blessing.  Like all vending machines, occasionally the blessing gets stuck and you have to insert more spiritual practices.

I feel deep shame around fasting.  Maybe because it was used as a punishment as a child.  Maybe because only the "holiest" of Christians fasted.  Maybe because it was required.  I don't know where all the shame comes from - but the idea of fasting, of intentionally putting something down to make time and space for God to whisper.  That idea stirs my desire to run, to hide, to cower.  My view of God is still so warped, especially when it attaches to any kind of spiritual discipline that I grew up with.  Too quickly it spirals into feeling guilted for not reading enough Scripture, for not attending enough services, for not serving in children's ministry.

It feels like just about everything connected to my faith it tinged with shame and guilt.  It's not how I want it to be.  When I get away from religious behaviours, I find freedom and connection with the Divine.  In churches, in Bible studies, in public prayer, in Scripture reading I find terror.  It would be easier in so many ways to walk away, to throw my hands up in the air and give up.  It's exhausting, painful work to keep facing the fear and sharing the shame.

For today I'm choosing to be honest.  I'm choosing to not heap judgement and condemnation on myself for where I am at in this journey.  Today I choose to honour my journey, to honour my pain and the raw places by lifting off the veils.  Today I sit in the ashes of my faith, surrounded by flickering embers and weep for my little girl self.  The one who believes she is evil because she is a woman.  It was a woman who caused a man to stumble and people have been tripping over her ever since.

I weep for the scars, the white lines that continue to stand witness to my pain and the damage inflicted on my soul.  I weep for an identity that was shattered before it was formed, and for the years I've spent scrambling to find, to hold all the pieces together.  It wasn't fair, it isn't fair and my heart screams at the injustice of it all.

Here is my shame, it is threaded through so much of my heart.  How do I fast from it, when I feel shame that I exist?  I don't know.  There's less shame than there used to be and maybe for today, for this time that is enough.  For today I hold my head up, tears streaming down my face and declare that I am enough.